The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database
(EMEDD) consists of a combined 225,000 word-entries
from eighteen Renaissance dictionaries or glossaries
published in England from 1530 to 1657. It is a
representative collection of lexicographical texts on
which a period dictionary serving Shakespeare's
language, Early Modern English, might be founded. The
database consists of

four English hard-word dictionaries -- Edmund
Coote (1596), Robert Cawdrey (1604; courtesy
of Raymond Siemens), John Bullokar (1616),
and Henry Cockeram (1623) -- and one English
word-list by Richard Mulcaster (1582);

the first full English-only dictionary --
Thomas Blount (1656);

three specialized lexicons -- William Turner
on herbal names (1548), Henry Mainwearing on
maritime words (1644), and John Garfield on
scientific terms (1657); and

four treatises with substantial glossing --
Pierre Valence on French grammar (1528),
Richard Sherry on schemes (1550) and on
figures (1555), and George Puttenham on
English poetics (1589).

The texts of Sherry and Mulcaster are donated by
Jeffery Triggs, Director, North American Reading
Program for the Oxford English Dictionary. My
graduate course on Shakespeare's language at the
University of Toronto employed an online database of
most of these dictionaries during 1995-96. Indexing
and retrieval is managed with Open Text Corporation Pat,
version 5.0, but Mark Catt, a student in that course,
wrote an easy-to-use interface to the Pat
database and called it patter. He recently
adapted this for the World Wide Web as patterweb.

127,920 word-entries from eleven of these
lexicographical works (Palsgrave, William Thomas,
Mulcaster, Coote, Minsheu, Cawdrey, Bullokar,
Cockeram, Blount, and Garfield) are now available for
free general inquiry on the Web at

enabling users to obtain between 25 and 100
citations for any word, partial word, or word
combination in the corpus or in any one of the eleven
dictionaries.

The early dictionaries in the EMEDD have two main
uses. They first serve diachronic linguistics and
historical lexicography. Jürgen Schäfer's thorough
study of over 135 Renaissance English glossaries
showed that ten percent of the 47,938 word entries in
his database contributed antedatings, unnoted phrases
and proverbs, and occasionally neglected word-forms
and senses to the Oxford English Dictionary.
My studies of words found from aa- to ac-
in two large French-English dictionaries by John
Palsgrave and Randle Cotgrave (Lancashire, "The
Early Modern English Renaissance Dictionaries
Corpus"), and of the words `monastery' and
`timber' in most of the EMEDD data (Lancashire,
"An Early Modern English Dictionaries Corpus
1499-1659" and "The Early Modern English
Renaissance Dictionaries Corpus: An Update"),
confirm Schäfer's conclusions. Early dictionaries
also are proving useful in understanding Renaissance
literature. A search of the EMEDD for all words in
Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy,
for example, revealed new information about
Shakespeare's language. Although this speech is one
of the best-annotated in literature, both the OED
and Shakespearean editors missed the import of
Hamlet's reference to the "slings and
arrows" of Fortune. Cotgrave's French-English
dictionary (1611) explains the term
"mangonneau" as "An old-fashioned
Sling, or Engine, whereout stones, old yron, and
great arrowes were violently darted." Fortune
holds but one weapon, a sling, not two, a sling and a
bow; and Hamlet is not too disturbed to make an
allusion to warfare technology known to be from his
time.

In this essay I apply a larger EMEDD to Titus
Andronicus. Again, findings show that the Hamlet
annotation typifies what contemporary computer
textbases like the EMEDD have to offer readers of
Shakespeare.

2. Renaissance word-meaning

In The
Defence of Poesie (1595) Sir Philip Sidney
praised English for its lack of grammar, "being
so easie in it selfe, and so voyd of those combersome
differences of Cases, Genders, Moods,
& Tenses, which I thinke was a peece of
the Tower of Babilons curse, that a man should
be put to schoole to learn his mother tongue."
Sidney candidly expressed views common in his time.
When The Defence was printed in 1595, no
grammar or dictionary for Early Modern English had
yet been published. The standard textbook for English
grammar schools, originally written by William Lyly
and John Colet, assumed that students understood
their native language. They gave no instruction in
English. Only in 1596 did one Edmund Coote, Master of
the Free School in Bury St. Edmonds, publish, in The
English Schoole-Maister, a guide to the spelling
and meaning of 1,357 "hard english words"
to supply the needs of someone past "his
letters" but still "ignorant in the Latine
tongue." Coote hoped to help young people and
adults who were literate enough to read his formal,
almost periodic English prose but who had not
attended Grammar School.

Coote's Schoole-Maister, the first reference
book on Early Modern English, has been undervalued by
scholarship (for example, the OED cites it
only once). He popularized the two-part,
hard-word/synonym dictionary "definition"
that would be used by Robert Cawdrey (1604), John
Bullokar (1616), Henry Cockeram (1623), Thomas Blount
(1656), and many more lexicographers after them. In
the 1590s the late modern concept of a lexical
definition had little currency. The only dictionaries
existing well into the 1590s were bilingual ones. As
a consequence, the only words that contemporaries
thought to be in need of explanation were foreign in
origin; and the mode of explanation was
translation--giving a word or phrase in common
English that, as a synonym or equivalent for the
difficult word, could be used in its place. The
"hard" word was interpreted (Coote's term)
by one or more "plain" or familiar words
supposed to correspond to that hard word. Hard and
plain words were interchangable, much like the two
parts of Renaissance bilingual-dictionary entries,
the foreign word and the corresponding English word
or words.

In fact, it occurred to no one in Shakespeare's time
that words could be "defined." A
"logical definition" existed as a concept
(e.g., in the mid-century work of Thomas Wilson) but
concerned a thing in the world or something in
experience. Elizabethans used definitions to describe
objects. It was not then the practice to adopt a
logical definition of the thing to which a hard word
referred to explain that word. That is,
lexicographers did not employ what we now call
referential definitions, which describe the meaning
of a word by referring to the logical definition of
the thing that the word denoted. Words were widely
regarded as straightforward signs or pointers to, or
names for, things. The signification of any plain
English word, i.e., which thing it denoted, was
evidently not often in issue. Sidney, for one, admits
to having had no trouble understanding any English
word, plain or hard. English was "easie"
for him. His assertion that poetic language is a
"speaking picture" corroborates the view
that word signification in the Renaissance is
denotative.

A randomly selected example may illustrate this
point. John Garfield's Physical Dictionary
(1657) has the following entry:

Agaric, a kind of Mushrom, or
Toad-stool, of great use in Physick: it grows
upon the Larch tree in Italy, and is white,
light, brittle, and spungeous; it purgeth phlegm,
and opens obstructions in the Liver.

Compare the definition found in the OED
today:

Agaric . . . 1. Herb. and Pharm..
A name given to various corky species of Polyporus,
a genus of fungi growing upon trees; of which P.
officinalis, chiefly found on the Larch, the
`Female Agarick' of old writers, was renowned as
a catharitic, and with P. fomentarius, and
igniarius, `Male Agarick' used as a
styptic, as tinder, and in dyeng. Obs. or arch..

Garfield describes the plant as a thing ("it grows . . . it purgeth
. . .") but the OED concerns a "name" or word. Whereas
Garfield's explanation has details of physical appearance ("white,
light, brittle, and spungeous") and tells us where to find the plant
(in Italy), the OED gives the kind of encyclopediac account familiar
from logical definitions. The first dictionary entry acts as a pointer
for something in the world so that we know how to use the word in practice.
The OED explains the word by transferring to it the logical definition
of the thing that the word denotes. Late modern lexicography moves complexity
from the thing to the word signifying the thing.

Why was English at this time easy, given that it has,
since then, become so difficult that we put our
children through a dozen years of formal instruction
in their own language? Most post-secondary students
in North America today take at least one further
year's instruction in English composition or
effective writing. Our students also routinely buy an
English dictionary and a book that teaches grammar,
in some sort; and their word-processing software
includes spell-checking, at least. Classes in
literature teach, as a matter of course, that words
are regularly polysemous and that even simple
expressions may suffer from ambiguity, especially in
Shakespeare's period. College-level reading has
become a decoding or deciphering exercise. The OED
entry for any common word discriminates many senses
and makes semantic distinctions that bear the
authority of many lexicographers from Samuel Johnson
on. All in all, anyone who ventures to agree with
Sidney today that the teaching of English is
unnecessary would be an instant laughing stock. Yet
no one in his own time labels the author of the Arcadia,
Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence a
fool.

The Renaissance period is oblivious to the problem of
word meaning. Writers and readers understood one
another then without English dictionaries, without
the modern notion of referential definition, and
without formal instruction in English. The sole
recorded complaint made by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries about the interpretation of English
concerned ink-horn terms, that is, "hard
words" adapted from Latin and other languages
without explanation. Coote and his successors met
this popularly expressed need by supplying
hard-to-plain-word conversion tables. Because no one
complained about semantic ambiguity, are we not
obliged to assume that, insofar as the Early Modern
English period is concerned, it either did not exist
or, if on occasion words were ambiguous, their
context generally led people to their right
signification? As far as we know, no one in the Early
Modern English period found Shakespeare's plays hard
to understand. If words signified by means of
pointing to things in the world, semantic ambiguity
would arise only if two or more things were served by
one word. Such confusions, resulting from a failure
of language to have a unique sign for each thing, is
rare even today. How much rarer would this have been
when English speakers numbered in the few millions,
lived together on one midsize island, accepted a
common religion, enjoyed the same educational system,
had a much smaller vocabulary, and evidently shared a
view that English was an easy language. If Sidney is
right, then most contemporaries of Shakespeare would
have understood his English immediately,
transparently, whether they had a grammar school
education or not, except where he used words imported
into English from languages like Latin. Just by
virtue of sharing one and the same world, whose realia
were signified by a limited stock of word signs,
Shakespeare and his hearers or readers would have
understood one another.

Jointly, Sidney and Coote give guidelines for
understanding Shakespeare today. First, we must
understand the world he lived in. His words reflected
the minutiae of that world faithfully and
unambiguously. Second, we must identify his hard
words and discover which plain equivalents for them
were supplied during his time. The Early Modern
English Dictionaries Database compiles over
200,000 word-entries from more than a dozen hard-word
and bilingual dictionaries printed in the English
Renaissance, from John Palsgrave's English-French
grammar in 1530 to Thomas Blount's 11,000-entry
hard-word dictionary in 1656. Despite the lack of
pictures in this database, it equates most of the
words employed by Shakespeare with other words and,
unlike the OED, reflects only the Early Modern
English period and its unmodern view of word
signification.

3. Titus Andronicus and the
EMEDD

Titus Andronicus, a play printed in 1594, just
before Sidney's Defence and Coote's English
Schoole-Maister were published, illustrates what
there is to learn when we apply their two guidelines
and the EMEDD to glossing Shakespeare's language. The
opening lines of I.1 will serve. Thirteen forms of
content words identified as hard words by one or more
of Coote, Cawdrey, and Bullokar are in bold face.
Twenty-nine content words used by them as plain
words, equivalent to other words identified as hard,
are in italics.

Flourish. Enter the Tribunes and Senatorsaloft And
then enter
Saturninus and his Followers at one doore, and
Bassianus and hisFollowers
at the other, with Drum & Colours.

Saturninus.
1 Noble
Patricians, Patrons of my right,
2 Defend
the iustice of my Cause with Armes.
3 And
Countrey-men, my louing Followers,
4 Pleade my
SuccessiueTitle with your Swords.
5 I was the first
borne Sonne, that was the last
6 That wore the Imperiall
Diadem of Rome:
7 Then let my Fathers
Honours liue in me,
8 Nor wrong
mine Age with this indignitie.

Bassianus.
9 Romaines, Friends,
Followers,
10 Fauourers
of my Right:
11 If euer
Bassianus, Cæsars Sonne,
12 Were gracious
in the eyes of Royall Rome,
13 Keepe
then this passage to the Capitoll:
14 And suffer
not Dishonour to approach
15 Th' ImperiallSeate to Vertue: consecrate
16 To Iustice, Continence,
and Nobility:
17 But let Desert
in pureElectionshine;
18 And Romanes, fight
for Freedome in your Choice.

The Appendix gives the
glosses given to these thirteen hard words by Coote,
Cawdrey, Bullokar, modern editors of the play, and
modern lexicographers.

Three systemic differences between ancients and
moderns emerge from these glosses. First, "hard
words" such as "imperial,"
diadem," and "approach," belonging to
everyone's English now, are not glossed by
Shakespearean editors. We tend to be uninterested in
alerting readers to words that were potentially
unfamiliar to Renaissance readers. Second, the early
hard-word interpretors explain several Latin terms by
associating them with titles of men who could be seen
everyday in 16th-century London--tribunes are like
knight marshalls (Bullokar), and senators like
aldermen or magistrates (Cawdrey, Bullokar)--whereas
modern editors take pains to correct Elizabethan
usage by explaining terms historically (e.g., Bate
and Hughes on "patron," and Hughes, Waith,
and Onions on "the Capitol"). This habitual
difference stems from the denotative signification
favoured by Early Modern English: to be understood, a
word need only point to something in the world around
about oneself. Last, the moderns select abstract
senses rather than the concrete, specific equivalents
provided by the early interpretors, to whom
"consecrate" meant "made holy,"
and "continence" meant
"chastity." Unlike Saturninus, Bassianius
speaks in terms common in the Elizabethan homilies;
and unlike ourselves, his words point to particular
qualities.

As might be expected, bilingual lexicographers in the
EMEDD explain hard words not found in Coote, Cawdrey,
and Bullokar in ways useful to someone reading the
passage from Titus Andronicus. Several of
these hard words have to do with names, which modern
editors occasionally misconstrue.

For example, Sir Thomas Elyot explains Latin
"Saturninus" as "a mountayne at Rome,
whyche was afterwarde called Tarpeius," which of
course is the mount from which the Romans threw
traitors to their deaths. The New Arden editor
usefully glosses the name, "probably intended to
suggest a `saturnine' temperament -- under the
influence of Saturn," and the New Oxford editor
notes that "saturnine men (those under the
influence of Saturn) were `false, envious, . . . and
malicious.'" However, both editors omit the
Elizabethan understanding of Saturninus' name as
associated with the mount from which traitors were
pushed to their deaths, although the play often gives
Saturninus the height and the punative role of this
mount. He enters "aloft" when he becomes
emperor (I.i.295.1), an upper level from which he
accuses Bassianus of being a traitor (I.i.403). In
II.iii, Saturninus condemns Titus' two sons Quintus
and Martius, cast down by Aaron into a pit, for the
murder of Bassianus, whose body lies beside them in
it. The most detailed allusion, however, is by
Marcus. At play's close (V.iii.131-32) he promises
that, if the Andronici have done any wrong, they will
"all headlong hurl ourselves, / And on the
ragged stones beat forth our souls." This
directly alludes to the Tarpeian rock.

Saturninus also says that he wore the "Imperiall
Diadem" of Rome. Although "imperial,"
in our sense, is a hard word for the period, it also
partly names an English flower and as such needed
little explanation then. Thomas Thomas calls this
plant "Angelica, or imperiall" and relates
it to "Lingwort, or Longwort," and Randle
Cotgrave (under the French word "Empyre")
names it the "Couronne imperiale. Th'Imperiall
Lillie, or Crowne Imperiall; a great, beautifull (but
stinking) flower." Saturninus' self-description
is suggestive of his quality. The association of
characters with plants pervades this play. Marcus
compares Lavinia's hands to branches and leaves
(II.iv.18, 45). Titus his own hands to "with'red
herbs" (III.i.177) and later tells Marcus
"we are but shrubs, no cedars we"
(IV.iii.46).

A more important example is the meaning Shakespeare
clearly intended for the Moor, whose name is commonly
spelled "Aaron" in modern editions but was
always "Aron" in the quarto text. The prose
pamphlet that Shakespeare is thought to have used in
writing Titus does not give a name to the
Moor. However, the name Shakespeare chose tallies
with the view of evil in this pre-Christian play as a
natural force, irresistible and motiveless, and is
quite in keeping with the play's black humour.
Entries from three EMEDD dictionaries from 1587 to
1611 make Aron the name of a very common English
plant, never the name of Moses' brother Aaron in the
Old Testament, the usual critical gloss (Bate, ed.,
125). A search for the words "aron" and
"aaron" yields the following results. (The
eight-digit numbers after the at-signs are the
text-order numbers for the strings in the database.)

Arum minus. Little Cockow
pint.

Start-up 21:41 10-May-96

"aron": Th.Thomas
(TT_87 @ 10523015)

Arisaron, & Aris. Plin. A small hearb, hauing
a roore of the bignes of an Oliue, and it is more
sharp then Aron.

Vit: m. A mans yard; a beasts pizle. Vit de
caille. A Rayle. Vit de chien. as Vit de prestre.
Vit de coq. A Woodcocke. Vits de gouvernail. The
Pintles, or yron hooks whereby the sterne of a
ship doth hang. Vit de mer. An ouglie creature,
or excrescence, like to the end of a mans yard.
Vit de prestre. Priests-Pintle, hearbe Aaron,
Cuckoe-Pintle, Wake-Robin, Rampe. Vit volant. as
Pennache de mer.

John Gerarde's Herball (1597) gives plenty of
detail about this plant directly relevant to Aron in
Shakespeare's tragedy. A small member of the family
of dragons (682), this plant "has spots of
diuers colors like those of the adder" (681). It
is found in England, Africa, Egypt, "generally
in all places hot and drie, at least in the first
degree" (685), and . . . " groweth in woods
neere vnto ditches vnder hedges, euerie where in
shadowie places" (685).

Arum or Cockow pint hath great, large,
smooth, shining, sharpe pointed leaues, bespotted
heere and there with blackish spots, mixed with
some blewnesse: among which riseth vp a stalke
nine inches long, bespecked in many places with
certaine purple spots. It beareth also a certaine
long hose or hood, in proportion like the eare of
an hare: in the middle of which hood commeth
foorth a pestell or clapper of a darke murrie or
pale purple colour . . . . (684)

The name "pint" is the diminutive of
"pintle" or penis, a sexual allusion owing
to the shape of the pistil rising within the plant's
"hose or hood." The reason for the names
can be seen in the two illustrations (below), taken
from Gerarde's herbal. His account closes in
discussing the virtues of the plant, which when taken
internally decongests the lungs by causing coughing.
The final caution is worth noting: "The most
pure and white starch is made of the rootes of
Cuckowpint; but most hurtfull for the hands of the
laundresse that hath the handling of it, for it
choppeth, blistereth, and maketh the hands rough and
rugged, and withall smarting" (685).

Arum maius. Great Cockow pint.

The Moor shares many features of this natural
medicine. Called "the devil" (V.i.145),
like the dragon plant, and compared to the adder
(II.iii.35), Aron also has the plant's
"spotted" black body (II.iii.74) and its
"bitter tongue" (V.i.150). He associates
himself with shade (II.iii.15) and with lechery,
being Tamora's lover. Ironically, Aron is very hard
on the hands too, as Titus (who loses one of his to
the Moor's treachery) can testify. Lastly, like the
plant, Aron's punishment at the end is to be
"planted" or "fast'ned in the
earth" (V.iii.179-83). Bizarre among tragedies
of this period, Aron's end perfectly suits his
character and is entirely consistent with the thought
of Shakespeare's Sonnet 15, "When I perceive
that men as plants increase . . ." (5).

---. "The Early Modern English Renaissance
Dictionaries Corpus." In Jan Aarts, Pieter de
Haan, and Nelleke Oostdijk, eds. English Language
Corpora: Design, Analysis and Exploitation. Amsterdam
and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993. 11-24.

---. "The Early Modern English Renaissance
Dictionaries Corpus: An Update." In Merja Kytö,
Matti Rissanen, and Susan Wright, eds. Corpora
across the Centuries. Amsterdam and Atlanta:
Rodopi, 1994. 143-49.

Tribune. The name of two cheefe
officers in Rome. The first was Tribune of the
people, who was to defend their liberties, and
had therefore the gates of his house standing
alwayes open day and night. The other was called
Tribune of the souldiours, who had charge to see
them well armed, and ordered, being as the Knight
marshall is with vs. (Bullokar)

Tribunes: officials elected by the
plebians, or common people, of ancient Rome to
protect their rights (Waith);
tribune: in ancient Rome, title of
representatives of the plebs or common people,
orig. granted to them as a protection against the
patricians and consuls (Onions)

Senators

senator[:] alderman (Coote)

senator, alderman, or counsailer
(Cawdrey)

Senator. An Alderman, or graue
Magistrate of a citie. (Bullokar)

Senators: members of the Senate,
chosen originally from the patricians (Waith)

Patrons

patroni{s}e[:] defend (Coote)
patronage[:] defence (Coote)

patronage, defence, protection
(Cawdrey)
patronise, defend (Cawdrey)

Patrone. A defender, a great
friend that supporteth one (Bullokar)

patrons: protectors, supporters
(Riverside);
patrons: supporters, protectors, possibly also
with the technical Roman sense of legal advocate
(Bate);
patrons: protectors, defenders. The word derives
from patronus (Latin), a rich man or
patrician who protected his `clients' or
courtiers in exchange for their services (Hughes)

Successiue

succeed[:] follow (Coote)

succeede, followe, or come in
anothers place (Cawdrey)

successive title: right of
succession (Riverside)
successive: legitimate, in due succession to his
father (Baildon); successive: hereditary (Bate);
successe title: title to the succession (Onions;
Hughes);
successive title: right of succession (Bate)

Imperiall

imperiall[:] belonging to the
crowne (Coote)

imperiall, belonging to the crowne
(Cawdrey)

Diadem

diademe[:] crowne (Coote)

diademe, (g) a Kings crowne
(Cawdrey)

Diadem. A Kings crowne, or an
attire for Princes to weare on their heads, made
of purple silke, and pearle. (Bullokar)

indignity: antithesis of honours;
the insult of having his title questioned (Bate);
this indignity: i.e. physical exclusion from the
Capitol by Bassianus and his followers (Hughes);
indignity: i.e. to have a younger brother succeed
to the throne (Waith);
indignity: unworthy trait (Onions)

capitall, deadly, or great, or
woorthy of shame, and punishment (Cawdrey)

Capitole. An ancient palace in
Rome, so called (Bullokar)

Capitol: the summit of the
Capitoline hill in Rome, on which was the temple
of Jupiter, guardian of the city. Elizabethan
dramatists generally assumed that the Capitol was
the site of the Senate House . . . the assumption
is incorrect . . . (Bate); Capitol: Supposed seat
of Roman government. Elizabethans often confused
the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the
Capitoline Hill with the Senate House (Curia
Julia) near the Forum at its foot (Hughes);
Capitol: The hill on which stood the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus; often identified by the
Elizabethans with the Roman senate house (Waith);
Capitol: the great national temple of Rome,
dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on the
Saturnian or Tarpeian (afterwards Capitoline)
Hill (Onions)

continent, modest, abstaining,
chast: also the firme land where no ile or sea is
(Cawdrey)

Continencie. Chastitie,
temperateness (Bullokar)

continence: may either have a
rather broader meaning than that we now give it =
self-mastery, or may be in allusion to known
defects in his brother's character. The New
Eng. Dict. quotes from Elyot:
"Continence is a vertue which keepeth the
plesaunt appetite of man under the yoke of
reason" (Baildon);
continence: "Continence is a virtue which
keepeth the plesaunt appetite of man under the
yoke of reason" (Elyot, 179)" (Bate);
continence: restraint (Waith)